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Bill Gates Is Coming To A College Near You

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the your-class-will-be-assilmilated dept.

Xyn writes "Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates visited UW-Madison today as part of his 2005 College Tour, designed to promote greater youth involvement in technology careers. Gates discussed "The Impact and Opportunity of Technology: Why Computer Science? Why Now?" at a student forum."

15 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Personally... by Pichu0102 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think he wants kids to grow up to replace Ballmer and NOT waste money on broken chairs.

  2. Answer by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why Computer Science? Why Now?

    Because we need people with more skill to fix up all your shit Bill.

    1. Re:Answer by Korgan · · Score: 5, Informative

      Bought CP/M for $25,000 then rebranded it and sold 'licenses' for a hell of a profit. :-)

      Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.

      He knew machine code and ASM pretty much inside out for much of the architectures he built a BASIC interpretter for. To be honest though, beyond some of the original BASIC interpretters, and the earliest versions of PC-DOS/MS-DOS, I really cannot think of anything he directly had a hand in. By the time Xenix and OS/2 were on the cards, they'd already hired a decent sized development pool. I don't think he had any hand in developing the Microsoft contributions to those code bases.

      I vaguely recall him being very involved in Project Bob, but I can't remember if that was as a developer or just a very interested manager. Not that it matters. Project Bob was dumped in favour of Cairo.

  3. Wow by XMetal2001 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.

  4. The full tour by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're sad you missed out on the opening dates, don't worry, there's a few more to come:

    Wednesday: University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin.
    Thursday: University of Waterloo and Columbia University.
    Friday: Princeton University and Howard University.

    Found the dates on Kevin Schofield's blog, thanks!

  5. Re:Why to do computer science by flatt · · Score: 5, Funny

    What did the compsci major say to the liberal arts major?

    "Dude, shut up and give me a application already."

  6. Do as you say or as you do? by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?

    --
    Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  7. Come and get shafted, boys and girls! by SysKoll · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why Computer Science? Why Now?

    Come work in computer science, boys and girls! Why? Because you'll have an opportunity to experience first-hand the effect of offer and demand on the job market, when we at MS will lobby for an increase of H1B -- the ones for 2006 are already allocated.

    Because since the industry is mostly managed by lawyers and MBA, not engineers, you in the tech field will never compete with us lawyers and sons of lawyers for these coveted positions of execs who get a raise at the same time techies are laid off.

    Because in spite of all Bill Gates' public wailing for attracting talent, he spits on tech talent, and so do most CEOs. The only "talent" he cares really about is execs, especially sales and marketing execs. That's talent. Design? Programming? Architecture? A commodity at best. A cost to be outsourced.

    And you wonder why there is such a decrease in engineering and science students? Of course they want to work in finance and law. Do you think they are stupid?

    --

    --
    Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

  8. Re:Why to do computer science by OpenGLFan · · Score: 5, Funny

    What did the liberal arts major say to the comp. sci. major?

    "No, I won't go out with you."

  9. Gates Visted CMU a few years ago... by KewlJedi · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...and was greated with this http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/archive/2004/02/25/ 80113.aspx

  10. Cradle Robbing by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft depends on recruiting young developers more than on any other population segment it reaches - market, purchasers, legislators, investors, whoever. All that crazy-ass "developers developers developers developers, developers developers developers developers" ranting comes from the heart over there. But Microsoft has lost the zeitgeist in that segment - Linux got it. Otherwise, Linux's tiny market share, especially among normals, would never justify the amount of software developed for it by multi-platform vendors.

    Gates is out there trying to keep Microsoft looking cool to their most important audience. Too bad he's easily outcooled by an expat Finn and a cartoon penguin.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  11. Great Opportunity by max+born · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you happen to be there. Ask him lots of questions. Let's get something on the record. Here are some I can think of. Make up your own.

    Could Microsoft ever open its code and make more money from support than developement?

    What's up with Microsoft and Linux? Seems like you guys have the same goal of wanting to write geat software for the benefit of everyone. Why not collaborate?

    Microsoft was recently sued by 20 states and found guilty of violatling the Clayton and Sherman anti trust acts. What have you done to rectify that?

    It's still not possible to buy an MS-free computer from many vendords. Why? Will you personally pledge you will put no pressure on an vendors to sell "microsoft only" systems.

    Just keep asking questions. We want to know.

  12. Re:Quick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, if I ran an empire and was going to Waterloo, I'd want tight security too. Gotta learn from history, you know...

  13. Re:What else can CS give us? by adrianmonk · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What is left to study in Computer Science? What algorithms are still out there waiting to be uncovered?

    Well, for starters, nobody has even figured out whether or not P == NP yet. Sure, most people strongly believe P != NP, but nobody really knows for sure.

    Kinda along those same lines, cryptography is built on the idea that certain tasks can be computationally infeasible to one group of people (eavesdroppers) but feasible and practical for the people who want to securely exchange information. We have stumbled on some algorithms that seem to fit this in practice, but according to what I understand, there is not really a cryptosystem out there for which anyone can supply proof that the computations that look hard actually are hard. For example, if I recall correctly, RSA's security rests on the idea that it is computationally very tough to factor a product of two very large prime numbers. But we don't know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for doing this. All we know is that we aren't yet aware of one.

    There are other active areas of research. For instance, right now "managed code" systems like Java and .Net are in their infancy. Computers have only just recently become fast enough that it is practical to consider switching to just-in-time compilation, and the thing is, there are optimizations that can be done when compiling at runtime that can't be done when compiling before runtime. (For example, you can use real profiling data to automatically create code that is most efficient for the actual workload.) So there are bound to be a lot of techniques to be discovered in this area.

    And there are other potential areas of research as well. We are already starting to see dual-core processors because it's looking to be hard to increase processor speed in conventional ways. We could probably use some research on how to do parallelism in other ways, possibly even going beyond dual-core machines or even beyond Von Neumann machines. If we ever feel compelled to do that, let me tell you, there will be a whole bunch of research needed in programming languages all over again, because imperative languages mirror the architecture we are using now but won't be suitable for an architecture that lends itself to automatically taking advantage of parallelism.

    Finally, keep in mind where physics thought it was after Newton. It seemed that classical mechanics explained just about everything pretty well. Until Einstein came along and blew it all out of the water. For all we know, something like that could happen with computer science. Although it might be 100 years...

  14. Re:Why to do computer science by __int64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    What did the liberal arts major say to the compsci arts major?

    "Didn't you mean 'an'?"